NASA plans to use it to land astronauts on the moon, but that might be only the beginning of new opportunities — if it flies.
“Your whole development process, your whole design process, becomes so much simpler,” he said. “And that saves enormous amounts of cost.”
Indeed, Starship’s cargo space is so generous that it may take a while for the space industry to grow into it. “Starship is too big for most payloads today,” said Carissa Christensen, the CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, a consulting firm. “If it is cheap enough, that might not matter. And it could serve as a direct substitute for less capable vehicles in the near term. The real impact will be new concepts that take advantage of the vehicle’s massive capacity. It will take years for the market to design and manufacture payloads that are truly optimized for Starship.
In the near term, SpaceX needs Starship to begin flying regularly so that it can put the next generation of its Starlink internet satellites in orbit. They are more capable than the satellites in the current constellation, which are launched in batches by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But the new satellites are much heavier, about 1.25 tons, Musk has said, and would require Starship’s increased power.
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